Foswiki Windows Installation Guide

Purpose & Scope

This is a step-by-step Foswiki Windows installation guide. It should have you running a very basic Foswiki installation in short order. However, security issues and advanced settings are not discussed; please refer to the InstallationGuide for a more complete discussion of the installation process. We will take you through Apache2, Perl and Foswiki installation. Basic Apache administration skills could be useful but not strictly required. Basic computer administration skills are assumed.

Warning

Foswiki is straightforward to set up on Windows. However for better performance and security you're probably better off running it on a Linux machine.

Prerequisites

We applied this guide on an x86 machine running Windows XP SP2, but it should also work unmodified on Windows2003 server (you may need to disable IIS), Windows 2000 and Windows NT.

Assumptions

We assume that you placed Foswiki in C:\www\foswiki, but you can change the C:\www part to the installation directory you used.

Foswiki must be installed in a directory whose name has no whitespace. If Foswiki is installed in a directory whose name has whitespace, you will have to use the 8-character short name for the directory. To see the short name, use the dir /x command. For example, C:\Program Files has a short name similar to the following: C:\Progra~1. In configuration files, you must also use the 8-character directory name convention.

Note that using short names introduces a subtle dependency on how they are generated. It is highly recommended that you do not use any directory paths with spaces in them.

When updating Foswiki's configuration files, if it asks for a directory, it is recommended that you use the forward slash in the directory path (/). For example, C:/www/foswiki will work on Windows. Most of the configuration files that Foswiki generates use this convention. Using the backslash (\) can lead to problems and Foswiki's configuration page will warn about this.

Downloads

Installations

Install Apache2. Using the default installation settings is just fine.

Install ActivePerl. Here again using the default installation settings should work just fine.

Unzip your Foswiki release and put its content on a path without space characters. C:/www/foswiki will do just fine.

Foswiki configuration

Go to C:\www\foswiki\bin and copy/rename LocalLib.cfg.txt to LocalLib.cfg.

Edit LocalLib.cfg and replace the line $foswikiLibPath = "/absolute/path/to/your/lib"; by $foswikiLibPath = "C:/www/foswiki/lib";.

Open a command prompt cmd.exe.

Go to C:\www\foswiki\bin.

Run attrib -r * to make the files writeable; otherwise the next step will fail.

Run perl -I ..\lib ..\tools\rewriteshebang.pl.

Specify the location of your Perl executable (e.g. C:\Perl\bin\perl.exe) at the prompt and confirm.

Apache2 configuration

Go to Foswiki:Support:ApacheConfigGenerator. Correct the settings to suite your specifics or just copy the content of your foswiki.conf from that page and put it in C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Apache2.2\conf\foswiki.conf.

Open C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Apache2.2\conf\httpd.conf and add the line Include conf/foswiki.conf at the very end.

If you wish to enable short URLs, you will need to uncomment out the LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so line in your httpd.conf file

Restart your Apache server using the service manager or the Apache tray icon.

Congratulations

You are done!

Happy Foswiki

Notes

By default Foswiki uses Template Login where the login happens using a nice login page. Alternatively you may want to use standard Apache Login where the browser is asked to authenticate. The browser will then present the user with a standard username/password popup windows. If you use Apache Login with Foswiki installed on Windows the security setting {Htpasswd}{Encoding} must be sha1 and not the default crypt used in Linux/Unix.

If using Template Login or Apache Login, a .htpasswd file will need to be created using the apache htpasswd utility. The default location for the .htpasswd file is c:\www\foswiki\data.